Lifeboat Foundation

Last summer, at a time when the pandemic had strained many people’s finances, inflation was rising and unemployment was still high, the sight of the richest man in the world joyriding in space hit a nerve. On July 20 Amazon founder Jeff Bezos rode to the edge of space onboard a rocket built by his company Blue Origin. A few weeks earlier ProPublica had revealed that he did not pay any income taxes for two years, and in other years he paid a tax rate of just 0.98 percent. To many watching, it rang hollow when Bezos thanked Amazon’s workers, whose low-paid labor had enriched him enough to start his own rocket company, even though Amazon had quashed workers’ efforts to unionize several months before. The fact that another billionaire, Richard Branson, had also launched himself onboard his own company’s rocket just a week earlier did not help.

COVID changed many people’s willingness to shrug off the excesses of the rich. The pandemic drew an impossible-to-ignore distinction between those who can literally escape our world and the rest of us stuck on the ground confronting the ills of Earth: racism, climate change, global diseases. Even several members of Congress expressed their disapproval of Bezos. “Space travel isn’t a tax-free holiday for the wealthy,” said Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon. Bezos and Branson putting the spotlight on themselves as passengers served to downplay the work that hundreds of scientists and engineers at Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic had put into designing, building and testing their spacecraft. It also masked the reality that advances in private spaceflight really could eventually pay off in greater access to space for all and more opportunities for scientific research that could benefit everyone. All their flights did was give the impression that space—historically seen as a brave pursuit for the good of all humankind—has just become another playground for the 0.0000001 percent.

In the long term, Bezos hopes to develop the infrastructure that could enable humanity’s biggest goals in spaceflight — similar to how Amazon used innovations like the postal service to power its dreams decades later.

Bezos envisions giant orbiting cities, located close to Earth, that could enable humanity to expand to 1 trillion humans. The cities could feature leisure and recreation, or heavy industry that avoids polluting Earth nearby.

It could all start with flights like NS-20. Here’s what you need to know.

Sooner or later Musks childish, morally and politically inept use of social media will thwart his greater (and great) ambition. Whatever your personal beliefs, there is exactly ZERO doubt that every generation since and including millennials has become exponentially less willing to tolerate this kind of stuff. Musk is going to NEED to both the fresh and enthusiastic intelligence and majority scale support, and not JUST in SpaceX research labs and on site engineering teams either.

He’s going to need IMMENSE, PROLONGED, and RELIABLE political support even as the reins of power are being passed from one generation to the next. If he keeps using Twitter like he has nothing to lose and no one’s support He’s going to find that he really does no longer have anything to lose nor anyones support.

At that point, he’ll have difficulty getting from city to city, much less get to Mars to build CITIES or become a secure, far more survivable interplanetary civilization!

Continue reading “Elon Musk Shares Transphobic Meme Following Report of Grimes Dating Chelsea Manning” »

The SLS rocket is set to launch this summer.

NASA will roll out its SLS rocket to prepare for a wet dress rehearsal ahead of the Artemis mission.

SpaceX is counting on Starship rockets to carry more than 100 metric tons of cargo and crew per launch and help build out the company’s prized Starlink unit.

China’s lunar rover has beamed back a new image of the ‘dark side’ of the moon showing the winding path it has taken over the surface.

The Yutu-2 rover arrived on the moon three years ago on Change’e 4 — the first spacecraft to ever land on the far side of the moon.

Continue reading “China’s Yutu-2 lunar rover sends image from ‘dark side’ of the moon” »

Approximately 11 weeks after the process began, SpaceX has finished stacking its newest Super Heavy booster prototype – the first of its kind intended to host 33 new Raptor V2 engines.

Designed to launch Starship’s massive, namesake upper stage part of the way to orbit, Super Heavy is in many ways simpler than Starship but just as complex and unprecedented in others. Ignoring SpaceX’s unusual plans to have boosters land on huge mechanical arms installed on a skyscraper-sized tower, Super Heavy is ‘merely’ a large vertical-launch, vertical-landing liquid rocket booster – the likes of which SpaceX already has extensive experience with through Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. What mainly sets Super Heavy apart is its sheer scale.

Measuring around 69 meters (~225 ft) from tip to tail, Super Heavy – just one of two Starship stages – is almost as tall as an entire two-stage Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy rocket. At nine meters (~30 ft) wide, a single Super Heavy booster – effectively a giant steel tube – should be able to store at least six or seven times as much propellant as Falcon 9 and about two to three times as much as Falcon Heavy. Engine count and peak thrust are similarly staggering.

US startup company Green Hydrogen International announced plans for a a 60GW renewable H₂ project that will be powered by wind and solar. It’ll also produce clean rocket fuel for SpaceX, which is helmed by billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk, according to a report published yesterday in Recharge.

“We see Hydrogen City becoming one of the largest H₂ production centers in the world, supplying many different customers with 100% clean H₂ fuel,” founder Brian Maxwell told the energy industry pub.

The image below from GHI’s website shows the process of converting renewable energy from wind and solar farms into ammonia and rocket fuel. The key to scaling up production, the company says, is the large salt storage capability found in underground salt domes.

What if you could travel to the country of your choice in just 1 click? If that was possible, your train of thought would be, Let’s go to Switzerland, no Iceland…you know what, let’s go everywhere. Teleportation is a common part of science fiction characters but is it achievable?

The pandemic has been hard on us and forced us to step out only when it is absolutely necessary. But you know what, Teleportation can be the perfect thing for you. And Earth is not the limit, you can put on a suit and some oxygen cylinder and you can just teleport to the moon…Elon Musk, you there?😃

But as far as we know, everyone told us while watching science fiction, this is not possible but you know what they are not entirely correct.